The problem with naming
SEVEN SAMURAI Akira Kurosawa's greatest film is once you do that,
you've relegated so many worthy rivals to also-ran status. RASHOMON,
IKIRU,
YOJIMBO
and RAN
are the obvious rivals, but I could throw in
THRONE OF BLOOD
and DRUNKEN
ANGEL as personal favorites too. It's
probably best to think of SEVEN SAMURAI in light of what Kurosawa said
about it: "Japanese films all tend to be rather
bland... I
think we ought to have richer foods, and richer films. So I
thought I would make this kind of film entertaining enough to
eat."

It's an
East meets West film, in which Japanese history, values and traditions
are crossbred with Kurosawa's love for the westerns
of
John Ford and Howard Hawks, which is why SEVEN SAMURAI was so easily
remade into the American western classic THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN by John
Sturges several years later.
RASHOMON
asked the question "What is Truth?"
while IKIRU asked "What is Life?". SEVEN SAMURAI does delve
into
such issues, the story and characters being enough
to keep viewers preoccupied. A farming village, under the
threat
of attack by bandits, attempt to recruit samurai warriors to guard
their village, with nothing to offer them but three meals a day and a
place to sleep. The seven they eventually do win over include
one
that is not even a real samurai, and another who admits that his
strategy in battle is to run away.

For the last time,
Takashi Shimura
plays a lead role for Kurosawa, and is rewarded with the classic heroic
character of Kambei, the first recruited samurai who then gathers the
group together and acts as their
commander. It is
hard to believe this is the same actor who played the dying bureaucrat
of IKIRU. At 5 foot 7, he somehow projects an image of
somebody
much larger and stronger, helped by Kurosawa's framing. After
displaying his amazing range over the course of
many films for Kurosawa, Shimura had reached his peak with Kurosawa and
was about to be
eclipsed by Toshiro Mifune, whose good looks and boundless energy made
him the most popular star in Japan.

Mifune plays Kikuchiyo, the last samurai to join the band of seven,
with the kind of wild, uninhibited energy he first showed in
RASHOMON. Alternately funny, frightening, lovable and
irritating, Mifune in these two films is a force to be reckoned with
unlike any other
actor I can think of, with the possible exception of Harpo
Marx at
his most manic (think the passport scene in MONKEY BUSINESS).
With each film after SEVEN SAMURAI, Mifune
would learn to control his inner chaos and become an even finer actor
capable
of great subtlety - two of his best performances would be as reserved
businessmen in THE
BAD SLEEP WELL and HIGH AND LOW - but at this
point
in his career, Mifune was a gale-force wind blowing through Japanese
cinema, causing nearly as much onscreen havoc as Godzilla, who made his
debut the same year as SEVEN SAMURAI. You don't want to blink
when Mifune is around - you might miss five different facial
expressions. But despite Mifune's humorous,
high-spirited performance, Kikuchiyo is hardly just comic
relief. He is the heart of the film, as we watch his
character
work through several personal issues and change from clown to
passionate warrior and finally to the group's de facto spiritual
leader. Shimura may be the lead samurai, but Mifune is the
star of this excellent ensemble cast.

Even at three hours,
there is not
enough time to get to know every character, but some other actors stand
out
among the dozens of farmers, bandits and samurai. Yoshio
Tsuchiya plays Rikichi, a farmer
who eventually becomes the virtual eighth samurai (just as Mifune's
character is revealed to not be a samurai but a farmer) while Bokuzen
Hidari is hilarious and touching as Yohei, the befuddled farmer whom
Mifune's Kikuchiyo torments and teases throughout the film. His
is a true comic relief performance, used to alleviate the tension of
the film at key moments. Yet, in the end, we think of
him as a hero in his own way as any of the seven.

The boyish Ko
Kimura (although 31 years old at the time) is the film's Allan Jones,
playing in
the "coming of age" story of the film. He is the rich young
samurai-in-training
who wishes to learn from the older ronin.
He also falls for a farmer's
pretty daughter (Keiko Tsushima) in what is
one of the only love
stories in the entire Kurosawa canon. Leave it to Kurosawa to
bring in the film's romantic story only after an hour and a half has
gone by.

After two hours of
planning, training
and strategy sessions, the film climaxes in a three-day battle in which
Kurosawa displays what he has learned from Ford and Hawks while
treating us to some creative tricks of his own, developed over the
course of his
career. In this and other films such as HIDDEN FORTRESS
and
RAN,
Kurosawa shows he is the equal to his idols when it comes to filming
large-scale action sequences. But throughout the film, even
in relatively
peaceful scenes, Kurosawa displays a knack for doing amazing
things with the
camera without calling attention to the shots themselves. You
can
turn the sound down and study this film for it's extensive use
of deep focus, perfect compositions and beautiful
cinematography. Most astounding of all is Kurosawa's use of the track
and pan, where a camera flows along with the screen action (track) yet
will turn its attention left and right when necessary (pan), creating
almost a widescreen effect on a standard screen.
You'll
find these shots throughout the film, especially in the long, final
battle. Simply dazzling stuff, made to look easy, as if
everybody
filmed movies that way.

The film is considered to have
brought many things
we now take for in action films.
There is the innovative use of slow motion to
emphasize action, used sparingly here only for a handful of death
scenes but now a common, almost irritating cliché of action movies.
There is the story device of one man
gathering together an eclectic group of others for
a dangerous, near-impossible
mission, which we would see again and again in various genres.
We
also find a main hero (Shimura's Kambei) introduced to us in a
miniature story of his own, unrelated to the main plot, a technique
which would flower into those memorable mini-movies in the pre-credit sequences of
James Bond films. Of course, there is
the famous shot of the gathering horses on the hill, perhaps the first
of its kind. Kurosawa may or
many not have invented these things, but like Orson Welles and CITIZEN
KANE, he is the man that pulled all these elements together for the
first time in one film. Because so many actors and directors
admired SEVEN
SAMURAI, and John Sturges' 1960 Western remake THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN,
Kurosawa's film has had an enormous effect on several genres, including
action, thrillers, war movies, sci-fi and caper films.

So is SEVEN SAMURAI
Kurosawa's
greatest film? I still don't know yet. I've seen it four
times
now in two years, and could watch it again tomorrow. I've
finally
given it a full five stars. Yet I still
personally prefer the simpler YOJIMBO, the deeper IKIRU and the weirder
THRONE OF BLOOD. But it certainly ranks right up there with
these
films, should be recognized as the father of the action genre as we
know it today, and will remain a classic for as long as movies
are
taken seriously.
Which, these days, could be only another few weeks or
so. - JB